Along with the screen size increase and the enhancement of performance of displays, televisions are not being merely used for viewing broadcast programs or movies.
Specifically, televisions having new functions such as browsing of diverse information on the Internet, coordination with home appliances connected through a network, and a wide variety of applications including photo browsers and games are being developed and increasingly used.
In such a situation, to operate the diverse applications or functions, it is indispensable to develop input apparatuses which allow more flexible input operations, in addition to conventional input apparatuses including a plurality of buttons.
A pointing device is an input apparatus which successfully designates a given position or direction by controlling a pointer or a cursor displayed on a screen. For instance, a touch panel, a trackball, a joystick, and a mouse are put to practical use as the pointing device.
Because, compared to a conventional button-based input apparatus, the pointing device allows easy versatile operations such as menu or object selection regardless of the configuration of a GUI, the pointing device is installed on many cellular phones, AV apparatuses, and game consoles. Above all, many apparatuses which adopt a touch panel or a touch pad as the input apparatus have been developed in recent years, and the apparatuses are characterized by a sense of intuition for operation by directly touching with a finger or a pen.
With the advancement of the sensing technology, it has become possible not only to perform operations such as cursor movement and GUI objection selection but also to directly perform various functions through a “gesture operation” which inputs a specific movement or trajectory on the touch pad/touch panel.
Such a touch operation which allows easy input with only the hand is often adopted by small handheld apparatuses.
Patent Literature (PTL) 1 discloses a method of scrolling on a screen by performing an operation of drawing a line trajectory (slide operation) on an operation region provided at an end of a touch pad without selecting, with a cursor, a scroll bar provided as a GUI object.
When a vertical scroll is performed, an upward or downward slide operation is inputted at the right end of the touch pad. When a horizontal scroll is performed, a rightward or leftward slide operation is inputted at the bottom end of the touch pad.
Moreover, even when a touch operation is started from the end of the touch pad, moving a finger to the central direction of the touch pad also makes it possible to switch to a normal cursor movement (a pointing operation) without scrolling.